Reginald Perrin Life and Ours on BBC

Several years ago, I stood at the foot of a sheer rock face in southern Turkey, looking up, rather dizzily, at hundreds of tombs - small caves - hewn out of its solid stone surface during an ancient era previously unfamiliar to me.
From what I'd gathered, these pockets had been chiselled from the rock by stonemasons - slaves - suspended on ropes controlled by other slaves on the cliff-tops. Heaven only knows what must have happened on days where the rope-bearers had a migraine or a touch of Turkish tummy - or any kind of grudge.
I found these artifacts, if that's what one calls them, singularly disturbing; and ever since have been troubled by an image of unknown persons suspended in the air, fighting the rock, at the mercy of their holders and owners... and by the uncomfortable realisation that all 'advanced' civilisations, including our own, are built, for better or worse, on slave labour.
Now I haven't been working on any rock-faces recently but I spent three months last year in a top West End agency, trading my time for cash. While my own necessity dictated my servitude, and I'm likely to be branded an ingrate even to think it, from day one it was clear I'd surrendered my entire life to a machine involved only with its own survival, to which my safety, well-being, or ideas apart from those relevant to its purposes were utterly irrelevant. All around me, in our trendily appointed, electronically-entered-or-exited cage, people from every part of our planet spent long, long hours sitting before their computer screens or picking at their Blackberries in a desperate competition to become the Company's rope-holders rather than its stonemasons.
All around me, in the bars, restaurants, and clubs of London where the sleek inheritors of Margaret Thatcher's Britain drink themselves senseless each night and all weekend, was evidence that living like this was just normal - the acceptable price of any kind of success... and that other ways of being, or living, or seeing had become virtually inconceivable.
So let's thank the BBC, once again, for having the wit to revive and air, from Friday, 24th April 2009, that most subtle and seditious of comedy characters: Reggie Perrin. For Reggie is not and never was a natural rebel - he's an ordinary middle-class man who wakes up gradually to a truth about his existence that changes everything. It's a most timely revival, and I'm sure that Martin Clunes will do a fine job of rendering Reggie in his own intelligent, discomforted fashion.
Comparisons with the original will no doubt be made, but I won't be making them. Leonard Rossiter's RP was a great creation but production company Objective gives us a Reggie for our times. The BBC has teamed up the series' originator and original writer, David Nobbs, with Simon Nye, who worked with Clunes on Men Behaving Badly, the show which brought them both their first major success - so it promises both edge and lots of pointed laughs.
We live in difficult times, and things just aren't that funny for a lot of people just now. While we may never develop Reggie's brand of crazy courage we should at least be asking whether the world we, daily, acquiesce to is the one we want our children to inherit, and whether the handsomely-toned conformity that contemporary working life demands is worth its price.
So stay in this Friday and watch it, if you can keep your eyes open after your week at work... and if (of course!) you dare. by ALEXANDRA BRUNEL